Frederick Buechner Quotes

Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom, the good thief said from his cross (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well.

The best moments any of us have as human beings are those moments when for a little while it is possible to escape the squirrel-cage of being me into the landscape of being us.

If our pain doesn't destroy us, it just might transform us into truly human beings at last.

The magic of words is that they have power to do more than convey meaning; not only do they have the power to make things clear, they make things happen.

Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.

Almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved.

Wether you call on him or don't call on him, God will be present with you.

The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is worldly language.

... in the long run, there can be no joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all

There is no event so common place but that God is present within it, always hidden, always leaving you room to recognize Him or not to recognize Him.

Gail Godwin has written a book about the heaviest matters of loss, grief, and loneliness with a touch so light that I was as often deeply amused by it as I was deeply moved.

I believe with the best of who I am in God, but I sometimes think if anybody would watch me and [they] didn't believe a damn thing, they would have a very hard time deciding which of us is which.

Pray anyway. Who knows what God can do through your prayer?

Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else as unsuccessful as you are.

When a man leaves home, he leaves behind some scrap of his heart. . . . It's the same with a place a man is going to. Only then he sends a scrap of his heart ahead.

Your vocation lies in the intersection of the world's deep need and your deep joy.

Vocation is the place where the world's greatest need and a person's greatest joy meet.

It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.

Where your deep gladness meets with the deep hunger of the world, there you will find a further calling.

I don't know how to save my own life, so anything they've found in what I've written that saved theirs - I can't take responsibility for it.

Becoming a Christian was terribly helpful to me. I can't imagine finding my way without it. I think it can be very crucially important to ally yourself with some religion.

If you are going to proclaim the Christian faith, speak about those dimensions of it which you['ve] had some experience with.

Laugh till you weep. Weep till there's nothing left but to laugh at your weeping. In the end it's all one.

You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary

To be bored to death is a form of suicide.

Like a house in the rain, books were havens of permanence and protection from whatever it was that as a child I needed protection from.

To be bored is to turn a cold shoulder to engage all that God is and has for you in the moment.

The Jesus who is the one whom we search for even when we do not know that we are searching and hide from even when we do not know that we are hiding.

The preaching is part of the reason I don't go to church. Plus, I don't know, it was never part of my tradition.

No words come easily to my lips. I think ultimately - what I like to think is that I'm in some sense hearing the mystery itself.

People will buy snake oil from anybody who seems to be selling it in a persuasive way.

I pray for people I love when they are sick. I pray that way.

I've written a lot of autobiography, which also involved listening.

Preaching and writing - it's the same. Whether I'm writing to speak or writing to be read in a book, it's the same thing.

You hear as many things as you would imagine. I hear voices of people I loved once. I hear moments that took place. I hear silences.

I'm a hopeless prayer. I think somewhere in there I spend a great deal of time at it.

I'm trying to listen to my past, listen to what's most deeply going on inside myself, my creative set of fictional characters, a fictional world - to listen to that world, to search.

To believe in Christ is to give your heart to Christ, which means not to affirm things about Christ, but it's like what you mean when you say, "I believe in my friend."

My prayer is spasmodic, occasional, desperate. It has a great deal to do with my children's physical well-being - that when they're traveling in the air the plane not crash, things like that.

It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence.

The contradiction is resolved when you realize that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love. -p83

It is within the bonds of marriage that I, for one, found a greater freedom to be and to become and to share myself thatn I can imaine ever having found in any other kind of relationship.

I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real.

It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around...

Once we have seen Him in a stable, we can never be sure where He will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation He will descend in His wild pursuit of men.

The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a boy is born to a couple of hick Jews.

... the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both...

You have to suffer in order to be beautiful.

[W]e are none of us very good at silence. It says too much.

With words as valueless as poker chips, we play games whose object it is to keep us from seeing each other's cards.